Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism. Francis Crick More Quotes by Francis Crick More Quotes From Francis Crick The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar. Francis Crick balancecellsdoe In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death. Francis Crick independentbelievepeople I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average. Francis Crick dnasciencethinking It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material. Francis Crick rnavirusesdna You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking. Francis Crick hackingengineeringreverse An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. Francis Crick origin-of-lifemiraclemen A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much. Francis Crick men There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper. Francis Crick paperaveragescience In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign. Francis Crick strongreadingmath Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity. Francis Crick horsepigsscience Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus. Francis Crick free-will God is a hacker, not an engineer Francis Crick hackersengineersinspirational One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together. Francis Crick achievementdnakeys We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind. Francis Crick guaranteesrunninglong In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy. Francis Crick logiclazymath You’re nothing but a pack of neurons. Francis Crick neuronspacks A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. Francis Crick recordsagebelieve If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case. Francis Crick impactscienceart What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? Francis Crick viewsideasreligion Evolution is cleverer than you are. Francis Crick graphic-designevolutionscience
